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Can anyone give me advice on beginning to draw comics? I'm really new to visual art, so I've been practicing basic drawing skills lately. In the spring I'm going to be taking an undergrad course in beginning drawing and a graduate course on graphic narrative. I've been getting this impression that like, drawing pictures of my living room probably won't help me learn how to draw a character very much. Are there any good books/blogs/video series that I could look to, especially for the drawing side of things? I have Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and I'll pick up Making Comics before too long, but I get the impression that it will be more about structure than about the elements of drawing. Thanks 
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Nov 16, 2015 17:40
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I made a little wordless comic for a drawing class I'm taking   I like doing these haiku-ish 4 panel comics.
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May 4, 2020 07:36
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I really like the color palette you went for with the city! I think the increased amount of white helps convey the coastal city element too
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Jul 5, 2020 20:42
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trophynano posted:Hey goons. I couldn't remember if I already posted here but if I did it was a while ago... I was reading one of your interviews and realized that we actually read one of your comics in my MFA program! War of Streets and Houses  I still think about that comic pretty often. I really like The Contradictions. Anyway I just want you to know that you are that Sonic the Hedgehog comics fan to me lol. If it's okay for me to ask, do your students tend to come more from a background in art or in writing? For students dedicated enough to attend an MFA-level program specifically in comics, what tends to be the hardest thing they have to learn in terms of craft?
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Aug 19, 2020 21:16
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Learning by doing, right? I decided to stop being afraid and just start making my comic about goblins.
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Apr 27, 2021 04:18
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After far too much time putzing around, I finally started making the dang thing. some of the lineart in the first page got messed up when I resized it but alas. learn as you go, right? https://tapas.io/series/Goblins-Cavern  
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Feb 5, 2022 23:16
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Vakal posted:Does anyone here know of graphic novels that lean more heavily on text than images to get its story through? There's a biography called I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi that has some pretty text-heavy pages. 
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Feb 11, 2022 18:44
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I keep running into the same technical problem. This color distortion keeps happening when I try to convert an image to Tapas's desired resolution. I think it must be a problem with working at a high resolution (Clip Studio's "A4" size) and DPI (600) and trying to crunch it down to Tapas's low image quality. It reduces it to like, 15.43% size or something, which I can imagine leads Clip Studio to make some tough decisions about how to render the image.  Should I just set my DPI to 300 and work at the dimensions Tapas wants me to work at? Or should I ditch Tapas and fully embrace early 2000s energy and host my comic on a website of my own?
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Apr 10, 2022 18:29
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I figured it out! The issue was that when I was exporting the project file into a PNG, I was choosing "For Comics" as the scaling process. The "For Illustration" option was much more accurate at scaling it down. Not sure if this is really a permanent solution though--I suspect that if I have a page with dialogue, the "For Illustration" option might have some problems of its own. Thanks for the advice, everyone! Here's what the finished page at webtoons resolution looks like:  Due to some work-life imbalance, I ended up doing two pages at the beginning of the year and then taking two months before getting to page 3. Kind of scary. I'm thinking it might be worth it to make a personal site for hosting just so it can be like, my own little world.
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Apr 11, 2022 02:46
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Tapas seems like the closest thing, since comics like Heartstopper have gotten print publications or more out of their popularity on that site. As far as goon comics are concerned, I'd love to see a fresh list of ongoing and completed webcomics, personally.
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Dec 27, 2022 19:09
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At the start of 2022, in order to make myself practice, I decided to start a webcomic about a goofy goblin boy named Humphrey. I've done some little doodle comics before in the past, but this was my first attempt at sustaining a multi-page narrative in comic form. It took a whole year, but I managed to turn out a 10 page chapter. Goblins' Cavern  I learned a lot about making comics over the course of last year. I think a few things really stuck out to me. The first thing was the realization that time and space in a comic are able to expand and compress infinitely. Each extra panel you devote to a facial expression, a gesture, or a different aspect of the scene is, in a sense, a form of time dilation. It's like how a single fight in Dragonball Z can take dozens of episodes to conclude. I really didn't intend to write a long fight scene for the first chapter, but it somehow ended up that way by accident. The second thing is that style is really tricky to nail down as a beginner. I tried to keep some amount of internal consistency with my art style throughout the chapter, but the problem is that my art skills at the start of 2022 and at the end of 2022 were fairly different. In a way, the early pages feel clean to me because I was working within my limitations, whereas I started to try to push myself out of my comfort zone partway through. I didn't have any real design sheets or character references to work from, since the whole point of this exercise was to improve my drawing ability. I wish I had started out by taking time to solidify my decisions on character designs, if nothing else. After 10 pages, I still couldn't really tell you what Humphrey's "default" appearance is; he can't even be off-model because on-model doesn't exist. Also, color is really hard!! The third thing is that dialogue is also really hard in comics! You have to be conscious of the physical shape of the words and where you'll place them in the panel. Trying to keep dialogue economical while still distinct is actually quite a challenge. I kept making the mistake of not factoring dialogue into my page compositions, and I think the characterization suffered because of it. The final thing that I learned is that comics are difficult, fun, and extremely time consuming. I think I had some pages take as little as 5 hours to complete, while the longest I spent on one page was at least 12 hours. Granted, a lot of that time was spent learning the software and trying to problem-solve things like "how do I arrange these panels to accommodate these big dumb goblin ears." Also, squeezing comic-making in around my full time job, I found that my vibe and energy each day really affected the work--far more than when I sit down to work on prose writing. All-in-all, I had a lot of fun making my first multi-page comic. I think I'll definitely work on some executive-level decisions before moving on to chapter 2. If nothing else, I want to try switching to grayscale.anyway sorry for the tedtalk, check out my silly little comic if you want to see some lumpy goblins fight a mean jello
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Jan 2, 2023 05:42
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I won't let this dead gay comics thread die. What are folks working on in 2023?
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Mar 23, 2023 05:33
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These days I assume that most people browsing reddit are doing so on their smartphones. On my mobile device, using the Awful app, your pitch was about 4.5 full screens of text. So even though 500 words doesn't seem like much, it's probably worth trimming it down for the purposes of a targeted ad. Here's an example of a Booklist review for Lucie Bryon's graphic novel Thieves, which is 223 words: quote:Ella, a flighty romantic, has been crushing on cute but quiet Madeline for ages, so when she finally bumps into her at a house party, it’s a dream come true. But Ella drinks too much and, in her stupor, steals an assortment of delightful objects from a closet in the house. Ella is desperate to conceal her crime from Madeline as their relationship develops, but when Madeline discovers what went down, a surprising truth comes out: Madeline had pilfered those objects in the first place! Now the girls are on a mission: return the items to their original owners during a circuit of house parties. Their mission has lot of the hallmarks of a heist narrative—Disguises! Sneaking around strangers’ houses!—but Bryon playfully turns that plot on its head. The exaggerated figure designs and warm palette of sunset tones in her artwork are beautifully eye-catching, and she creates a luxuriant sense of atmosphere in small background details and visual metaphors (Ella getting swept up in an ocean wave whenever she sees Madeline is especially darling). Since it was originally published in France, this book’s attitudes about teenage drinking are much laxer than in the U.S., but the youthful emotions are universal, and with distinctive characters, lush art, and an off-kilter sapphic romance at its core, this will surely steal teen readers’ hearts. And here's the description for Haley Newsome's Unfamiliar that you can find on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, at a trim 101 words: quote:Based on the wildly popular webcomic from Tapas, Unfamiliar is an endearing and whimsical story full of magical mayhem, offbeat outsiders, and the power of friendships and found family. Finally, here's the Barnes & Noble description for an old fashioned novel, Mieko Kawakami's All the Lovers in the Night, which is 225 words including an author blurb: quote:Bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami invites readers back into her immediately recognizable fictional world with this new, extraordinary novel and demonstrates yet again why she is one of today’s most uncategorizable, insightful, and talented novelists. This leads me to think that 150-225 words is probably the sweet spot for what you're looking for. The first example does some summarizing while still keeping the tone of a pitch, but it is for a more niche audience (librarians) than the two consumer-facing descriptions.
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Apr 26, 2023 04:31
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I've been storyboarding the second chapter of my webcomic, and I'm at a point where I have to grapple with some basic ground rule decisions. Things like color vs grayscale. Or whether i'm sticking to the safe zone of the page versus working in the bleed zones. Or even just like, character design. Chapter 1 was in color, and I find color very fun and attractive, but it is also very time consuming. Also, chapter 1 was only 10 pages long, while chapter 2 will probably be around 30 pages. For chapter one, I was working a page at a time, but I'm pretty confident that releasing a chapter at a time will be better for my workflow. How do folks make decisions about things like this? Go for what speaks to you, or think it through mathematically? I'm very much learning-by-doing, and I think that's totally cool for webcomics. But ideally if I ever complete the whole story, it'd be nice to turn it into a print comic. So I kind of feel like any decisions I make early into the process will have significant ramifications down the line. Comics are complicated!
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Jul 26, 2023 00:21
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Made a lil nature comic
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Dec 12, 2023 05:42
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KingKalamari posted:The one thing that I'm a bit concerned about is balancing the more pornographic aspects of the project with the narrative-focused aspects. For instance, in the chapter I'm currently working on the "money-shot" stuff doesn't really come into play until about 2/3s of the way through, and I'm worried about how that's going to go over with people who are just looking for spank material. I think you gotta be honest with yourself and clearly decide what the purpose of your comic is. If it's porn, then everyone who reads it is looking for spank material. In that case, there should be no separation between "the porn parts" and "the narrative parts"--the narrative should be porn. Even if nothing graphic is happening, it should have some sort of charge to it, because every part of the porn should be directly building a sense of eros. But if it's a story that happens to contain graphic depictions of sex, then you might want to consider the opposite philosophy--the sexual parts should be in service of the narrative. You can have a perfectly romantic story where the characters never gently caress, so the loving should in some way be meaningful to the story. (I recently read a graphic novel called Chromatic Fantasy that had several, several pages of X-rated gay trans action right in the middle of the story. It somehow made the graphic novel worse, not because the sex scenes were bad, but because they truly felt gratuitous to the story as a self-contained unit.) Back in the day a lot of visual novels felt compelled to include sex scenes for the sake of increased marketability. If you have your own platform then I assume folks who are reading your stuff already know what to expect. I guess I'd recommend like, looking up comics that are similar to what you want to go for, and analyze their structure. How many pages per chapter are they, what is the overall balance of narrative vs. erotica, is there a clear division between the two; do they have chapters without anything erotic happening? etc. good luck on your weird porn lol
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Mar 27, 2024 03:14
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Another lil nature comic
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Apr 12, 2024 03:00
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